Unformattable floppy problem
I regularly use floppy disks to take my outgoing emails to an Internet cafe and then to bring my incoming emails home to be read on our computer. We have a Toshiba Satellite 5200 with Windows XP home.
Regularly, after some weeks of use, I will insert a floppy that I have been using without problems into our computer and will receive a message: “The disk in Drive A is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?” It contains information that I have just put on it so it why has it now unformatted itself? If I answer “Yes” the computer fails to reformat the floppy. It stops after a couple of seconds and then advises that the disk in Drive A cannot be formatted. Going to Properties and then Tools is of no help. The floppy is shown as being full and already formatted as “RAW”. The error correction tools also stop after a couple of seconds. I should mention that we use AVG anti-virus and this is current. We bring the updates home on a floppy and copy them to the appropriate file on our computer.
We now have a large pile of supposedly unformattable floppy disks. How can we get these formatted and use them? How can we stop already formatted floppy disks from suddenly becoming unformatted and unformattable? In more than nine years of using a Power Mac 6100/66 with many floppies being used for back-ups and other purposes we lost only one floppy to physical damage. What’s the problem with these Windows boxes?
Last month was the second anniversary of buying this very unreliable and difficult to use computer and operating system. It was a very expensive mistake. We should have stayed with Mac. We have already decided that we will never again buy a computer from Toshiba or one using a Microsoft operating system. However, it will be some time before we have leave and are able to get back to the First World where we will be buying another Mac, even a used one if we cannot afford a new one. In the meantime we will just have to struggle along with what we have. If anyone can advise an easy way to stop this floppy problem we will be very grateful.